Once upon a time, I took karate lessons. It was for two years in high school, and the dojo was owned and run by the senior AP English teacher at my school, who happened to be an old acquaintance of my dad. (This happens when both of your parents have been teachers. You run into a lot of people who knew them at other schools or whatnot.) Anyway, I started taking the lessons because, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, of Karate Kid. I made my folks take me to see it, and shortly thereafter, my dad asked if I wanted to take karate lessons. I agreed, and shortly thereafter, I was taking two classes a week.
I loved it when we first started out. The teacher didn't call himself a sensei, which is what most dojo masters call themselves. We called him shihan, which means "master" and which, I discovered much later, was considered moderately arrogant of him. But that's what we called him. There were a couple of black belts in the class, and we called them sensei. But the classes were good. Advanced students paired with newer students to teach the punches and the kicks, and we learned kata, and we sparred. Actually, I had trouble learning the kata at the full-speed pace of the class, so I frequently stayed late to work on it with one of the senseis. And I loved it. I didn't care much for the warm-up exercises - situps and running and pushups, but I had a necklace that I wore all the time and thought of as my "focus", and it gave me just enough of a mental edge to get through them. I did situps and pushups every morning and night, too - at one time I was doing over 500 situps a day.
But what I liked best about it was the sparring. When I first started with the lessons, about twice a month we'd have sparring sessions. I loved to spar, even when I lost badly. This wasn't tournament sparring. This was a rough, defend-yourself-at-all-costs fight. The shihan sometimes set us up with two-on-one or three-on-one fights. Once he matched a new student against a mid-level student and laughed like a madman when the new student kicked the other student's ass, because the mid-level student only knew how to defend against karate and the new student had learned street-fighting. I loved it. I wasn't taking the class because I wanted the exercise, or because karate was a trendy thing to do. I was taking it because I had become aware of exactly how vulnerable I could be. (This is something men have trouble understanding. I won't say they can't understand it, because they can - but most of them don't bother to try.) But I was in the 9th or 10th grade, I had breasts worth looking at for the first time, and although I'd never once been so much as leered at, I was intensely aware of the target that I was. Part of the territory of being a woman. Later, I would learn that attitude has as much to do with protection as strength, and I would learn how to cope with the feelings of helplessness and fear. But I'm going off on a tangent. My point is, I enjoyed sparring.
A good friend of mine started with the dojo after I'd been there about six months, and I had an even better time, because we always partnered together for practicing attacks and blocks. Because we knew each other so well (he was by boyfriend's best friend) we knew better than to try to pull punches. We forced each other to learn faster and better.
I won't pretend that it was all rosy. Practices were occasionally brutal. I once acquired a hairline greenstick fracture in my shin during a sparring session and I was told to keep fighting, dammit, was I going to roll over because of a little pain? (I didn't know it was a fracture until over a year later when I had some x-rays taken for other reasons. At the time, I thought it was just a bone-bruise.) Once I whined about having to do pushups, and the shihan arranged everyone in a circle around me and we all did pushups until I literally collapsed. But the bulk of the memories I have are pretty good.
I quit taking karate because the fun went out of it. We switched from bare-hand fighting to weapons fighting. When I'd started, we would do a little weapons work about once every six months. By the time I quit, it was every other week. We stopped having the all-out sparring matches and switched to tournament sparring, where you stop after every blow that lands and bow and start over again. I'm short, and all my favorite moves involved taking a hit on the arm or in the leg in order to deliver a more telling blow to the stomach or the face. These were good tactics for real fighting, but useless for a tournament, because in tournament sparring the first blow gets the point, not the most damaging. It seemed that the school had shifted away from being a way to learn self-defense and into something that was nothing more than a trendy way to get exercise and win awards. And that's not why I was there.
When I took AP English my senior year, I had the shihan as my teacher. He taught a very unusual English class. Senior English was supposed to be World Literature. He picked, almost exclusively, books that had a somewhat oriental philosophy. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha, Illusions. We wrote exactly one paper the entire year. The rest of the year, we wrote essays, and then instead of turning them in we read them out loud to the rest of the class. Toward the end of the year, we broke into groups of four or five, and we created multimedia essays. My group did their essay on Finding Yourself, and we must have used ten or twelve rolls of film to get the forty or so slides we needed. We spent countless hours listening to each others' musical selections to pick the song clips we wanted. We drove for hours looking for the perfect spots for our photo shoots. It was fantastic.
As an English teacher, he still taught was I'd been missing in the karate classes: How to take something that's been done, and done, and done, and make it your own. How to take pride in what you do. How to face everyone and everything else without fear.
For those lessons, I will be forever grateful.
11:00 AM - So. Here I am. I just got so completely frustrated with my job that I just locked myself in the bathroom and cried for fifteen minutes. It's not just that the project is hard. I've had hard projects before, and they've been irritating, but not like this. The problem is that I'm pretty good at abstract design. I actually can see a clear picture in my head of how the pieces of this program should fit together. I can even write it up in pseudo-code. It's the nit-picky fucking details that are killing me. Convert this really big piece of information from one data type to another. Yeah, that's how it should be done - the best, the most efficient way to handle the program, but I haven't the slightest damned idea of how to go about it. Close off this library before starting the second, because they won't work in sync. Well, that's not the most efficient way to do it, but I have no control over the two libraries, so it's the only way to do it, but I still have to look up how to load a library in the first place every single time I do it. I haven't the least idea how to go about closing one!
So I go to my task lead for help. He spent the last several months learning how to handle that big piece of data, so I thought he'd have some good tips on how to do the conversion I need to do. He sortof waved in the general direction of some code that does the opposite of what I need to do, and gave me something to feed to the Help menu, which helped a little, but not nearly enough. To make matters worse, it seems like every time I ask him for help his answers get short and terser and more irritable-sounding. (This may not actually be the case; we're communicating via e-mail, which is notorious for transmitting incorrect impressions. But the point remains that this is the impression I'm receiving.) The longer I work on this project, and the more I have to keep begging him for scraps to the puzzle, the stupider and more useless I feel. After an hour and a half this morning of not being able to accomplish a gods-cursed thing, I collapsed under the pressure. I'm still feeling a little rough around the edges, like just anything could set me off at any time, which is not good, because I hate breaking down where people can see.
And I was in such a good mood this morning.
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